In a string of late-summer confrontations between the Democratic Party’s progressive base and its finance-friendly establishment, the party’s populist wing has recorded some of its most significant victories since Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s election last November.

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Elizabeth Warren grills Wall Street regulators

What to watch this week in politics

In New York City, Democrat Bill de Blasio won his party’s mayoral nomination — and now looks overwhelmingly favored to win City Hall — with a “tale of two cities” message channeling frustration with outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Manhattan’s upper crust. In Illinois, former White House chief of staff Bill Daley pulled the plug on a primary challenge to incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn amid a flurry of attacks on his background as a JPMorgan executive and corporate fixer.

And in Washington, a small group of liberals in the Senate — including Warren and Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon — effectively blocked Larry Summers from gaining the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, signaling with their early opposition that the former Clinton Treasury secretary would face a tough confirmation process thanks to his past support for market deregulation.

“I don’t think it’s any secret that Larry was not my first choice,” Warren, who rode her record as a consumer advocate and a wave of liberal anger at banks into the Senate, told MSNBC.

Each of those episodes — which unfolded in isolation from one another — had its own complicated internal politics, and Democrats say it would be premature to suggest any kind of revolt is under way.

But leaders on the more liberal end of the Democratic coalition say there’s a sense of momentum among progressives, who have been urged since the 1990s to hold back their hostility to corporate power or risk losing middle-of-the-road voters and donors. While Republicans vented anger over the country’s economic meltdown in part by electing tea party conservatives in the 2010 midterms, Democrats have largely stifled their rebellious impulses out of deference to President Barack Obama.

In an interview with POLITICO, de Blasio said it stands to reason that Democrats, irked by the slow pace of economic recovery and still unsatisfied by the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, would start to express those feelings more assertively.

“This is a moment in history where economic issues come to the fore, when the question of income inequality is very much on the mind of the voters,” de Blasio said. “As the crisis has deepened and government has in many ways failed to address it, there’s a growing anger, a growing frustration.”

He continued: “It’s absolutely right that elections this year, and I think next year, will be very much about these issues, because it’s most pressing to people.”

De Blasio built his insurgent mayoral bid around a sharp contrast with Bloomberg, an almost cartoonishly perfect plutocrat who mused in an interview on the eve of the Democratic primary that it would be great if “all the Russian billionaires” moved to the city and expanded its tax base.

Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, writing in The Daily Beast, called de Blasio’s campaign a harbinger of “new new left” — a generational shift toward progressivism among young people burned by the financial crisis and concerned about “economic inequality and corporate power.”